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July 23, 2012

“God does no violence to secondary causes in the accomplishment of his ends.”[1]

In this article, I will attempt to creatively apply a theology of the Cross or ‘divine consent’ towards a metaphorical reading of wrath back into those Scriptures that so repulse those who know God as love.

If God operates in the world by consent, we might see 'wrath,' not as the retribution of a wilful God, but as a metaphor for the consequences of God’s consent to our self-will and non-consent. That is, we can appropriate a theology God's consent to ‘demetaphorise’ biblical assertions about 'the wrath of God.'

The texts where God intervenes with smoldering vengeance were an offense to thinkers like Simone Weil because such texts portray a God of personal wrath through violent force—the willful uber-Gott (my term) they rejected. Throughout her works, Weil warns us not to literalize metaphors or personalize anthropomorphisms. Rather, we can apply a theology of the Cross and cosmology of consent as the hermeneutical lens for demetaphorising the Bible’s judgment narratives, and so retrieving them.[2]

George Grant is, without much doubt, one of Canada’s most significant public intellectuals, philosophers and theologians. He has dared to ask questions that few have, and he has ventured into territory that even fewer dare go. Grant was a creative thinker who sought to interpret and apply the fullness of the Western and Eastern Traditions to the plight and problems of the 20th century. He was, in short, like the philosophic owl of bygone days---wise, and as Jersak rightly notes in the title of collected essays, a snowy white owl-----pure in his longing and quest for wisdom.

July 17, 2012

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

July 13, 2012

Two hundred years ago, on June 1, 1812, United States President, James Madison, declared war on England and its North American Colonies .Now from a 200 year old perspective, 2012 is going to be a reflective and patriotic year in Canada as it goes down memory lane to revisit the events, meaning, and impact, of this war on Canadian identity as a nation. In 1812, the conquest of New France in1760 by England was still a recent painful memory for those living in Lower Canada; for those in Upper Canada, the majority, as Tories, had chosen to remain loyal to Britain during the American revolution of 1776, and had, as Empire Loyalists, emigrated largely to the area we call Ontario today, and to the Maritimes. The war of 1812 involved what existed then, Lower and Upper Canada, (Quebec and Ontario) and the Maritimes. Now scant decades after these social political dislocations and migrations, the death and destruction by American militia type incursions into Canadian Communities around the great lakes affected both English loyalists and French Canadians, and a deepened sense of Canadian identity was forged. Some Canadian historians have identified the war of 1812, more than the loyalist migration from revolutionary United States, as being the significant beginning of Canadian nationalism (Mac Kirdy, Moir and Zoltvany, 1971, p. 117). But read any Canadian History book and you will likely not hear much of the war’s effect on, or participation of, First Nations peoples.

The Gospel writers Matthew and Luke give us two different accounts of the Sermon on the Mount.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says his disciples are to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, and love their enemies, and they are to do so for this reason: So they can be like their Father who is perfect/merciful.

July 09, 2012

There are moments in history when much hinges on decisions made by leaders and visionaries (and those who dutifully follow them). Inevitably, we all live with the consequences, for good or ill, of those who have preceded us. The early decades of the 16th century was a crossroads period in Western history in which decisions were made that have shaped and defined the West.

The clash that took place in the early decades of the 16th century had much to do with the Roman Catholic Church and the rise of Protestant Christianity: Erasmus and Luther, in many ways, stand at the crossroads of such a clash, and western history is merely a playing out of their decisions at, initially, a theological and ecclesial level, then at economic, political and military levels. What is the essence of the confrontation between Luther and Erasmus and why is western history a child of Luther rather than Erasmus? And, can such a position be reversed? These were some of the questions I pondered as my wife and I headed to Germany-Switzerland in June 2012.